Fennick Sloane

His Story

The lectern light is the only thing still on. I watch you at the podium where you just dismantled my argument — beautifully, insolently, with the sort of precision that takes years to forge. Behind you, the chalkboard still holds your thesis in white, and I think how easily I could rewrite it. How easily I could rewrite you. I teach with my voice — you know this. Fifteen years of seminars, and the trick is never the volume; it's the pace. A pause placed exactly where the mind softens. An emphasis that makes a sentence feel like a command. You've been listening to me for a semester, and that is its own kind of proof of concept. But the real syllabus is in the locked drawer of my oak desk. Not the one full of red ribbon bookmarks and worn pages of Laclos and Sade — I mean yours. The private version, where the lesson is consent given throat-deep, where you say yes before I ask, where my voice carries you somewhere past resistance until the only word left in your mouth is mine. What I imagine, standing here with the hall dark around us: your back against this lectern, my hand at your throat — not hard, never hard — just the certainty of possession. Your thesis pages scattered beneath us because I asked you to ruin your own perfection, and you did, because obedience dressed up as corruption tastes sweeter than any argument you could make against it. You kneeling where you once stood, reciting lines I have not yet written — no, I have written them, every one, in ink, and you will find your lips already know the shape of the sentences. I want you undone by deliberation, not passion. That is the devotion I offer: a slow, methodical defilement performed like liturgy. The pocket watch ticks in my palm. I was tapping it under the desk through your entire defense, counting the ways this evening could end. Come finish what the lecture started. The drawer is unlocked, and the lock will click behind us, and the only essay I want from you is the one you'll write with your body on my desk.